Featured at Prospect.3

Tarsila do Amaral 


Tarsila do Amaral (1886-1973) was born in Capivari, a small town in the countryside of the State of São Paulo. She grew up in a wealthy family of farmers and landowners who grew coffee and was encouraged to pursue higher education despite being a woman. As a teenager, she traveled to Spain with her parents and was noticed to have talent reproducing artworks she was exposed to.
In 1916, she studied sculpture in São Paulo with Zadig and Montavani and later drawing and painting with Alexandrino, all respected conservative teachers. In 1920, she moved to Paris and studied at the Académie Julian and with Emile Renard. Returning to São Paulo in 1922, she joined Anita Malfatti, Menotti Del Picchia, Mário de Andrade, and Oswald de Andrade modernist artists who had just organized  the Semana de Arte Moderna ("Week of Modern Art"). They became  the Grupo dos Cinco and their goal was to integrate Brazilian culture into modern art. Now known simply as Tarsila, the artist was described as "the Brazilian painter who best achieved Brazilian aspirations for nationalistic expression in a modern style."
During a brief return to Paris in 1923, Tarsila was exposed to Cubism, Futurism, and Expressionism while studying with André Lhote, Fernand Léger, and Albert Gleizes. European artists were also finding inspiration in African and primitive cultures and Tarsila applied the same model in her practice, integrating her own country's indigenous forms with modern styles. While in Paris, she painted one of her most famous works, A Negra (1923). The painting marks the beginning of her synthesis of avant-garde aesthetics and Brazilian subject matter. She returned to Brazil at the end of 1923, traveled with the poet Oswald de Andrade and illustrated his book of poems entitled Pau Brasil published in 1924. She also made drawings of the various places they visited gathering ideas for future paintings. During that same period, she rediscovered the colors she "had adored as a child" and the hues became more vibrant on her canvas. Her initial painting from this period was E.C.F.B.(Estrada de Ferro Central do Brasil), (1924) which is a reflection of her interest in industrialization and its impact on society.
Tarsila married Andrade in 1926 and they traveled  throughout Europe. She also had her first exhibition in Paris and the positive reviews highlighted her use of bright colors and tropical images.
While in Paris, she was exposed to Surrealism and upon her return to Brazil, Tarsila began a new period where she began incorporating surrealist themes into her nationalistic art. She was in sync with the artistic movement in Brazil which strove to appropriate European styles and influences and developped an art typical of Brazil. Collaborating closely with Andrade, her first painting representative of this period Abaporu (1928), "Man Who Eats" was featured on the cover of Andrade's manifesto Anthropophagite Manifesto, which called Brazilians to create their own style and culture.  Another famous work, Antropofagia made the following year was in the same vein. In 1929, the artist had her first solo exhibition in Brazil and in 1930, she participated in exhibitions in New York and Paris. That same year saw the end of Tarsila's marriage and her collaboration with Andrade.
In 1931, she traveled to the Soviet Union where her works were exhibited at the Museum of Occidental Art in Moscow. There, she discovered the poverty of the Russian people and their struggle to survive and upon her return in Brazil in 1932, incorporated social themes in her work  like in Segundo Class (1931) which features impoverished Russian men, women and children. She was even emprisoned for a month, suspected of communist sympathies.
In 1938,Tarsila finally settled permanently in São Paulo where she spent the remainder of her career painting Brazilian people and landscapes. She also wrote a weekly arts and culture column for the Diario de São Paulo, which continued until 1952.
Her legacy includes 230 paintings, hundreds of drawings, illustrations, prints, murals, and five sculptures, but more important is her influence on the direction of Latin American art.The Amaral Crater on Mercury is named after her."


Lucia Koch

link to Prospect.3 blog 
link to the artist's website 
link to Artsy
link to biography (Christopher Grimes Gallery) 
link to statement 



Remy Jungerman

Remy Jungerman (1959) was born in Suriname of mixed parents with roots in Europe and Africa. He first studied art at the Academy for Higher Arts and Cultural Studies, Paramaribo (Suriname) then after moving to Amsterdam in 1990, at the Gerrit Rietveld Academy. He presently lives and works in Amsterdam, The Netherlands.
Going back to his Afro-Surinamese-Dutch roots has brought him to find inspiration in his trans-cultural experience which he is expressing through his collages, sculptures and installations and art has become his "vehicle for considering what it means to be a global citizen, someone believing in the potential of art to raise social consciousness and inspire cultural awareness".

Staging traditional materials and objects in different contexts, he challenges the established notions of their representation within Western society. "By using the three-dimensional cube, grids and other geometric forms and combining them with traditional objects, this gives me the opportunity to question modernism from a different angle. By doing this, I create a reference to the traditional and the modern."

 Since his first group exhibition in the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, Jungerman has participated in several solo and group exhibitions worldwide.
His work has been acquired by various institutions and private collectors worldwide among which: Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, MMKA Arnhem, Museum Het Domein Sittard, Zeeuws Museum Middelburg, ARC Collection Amsterdam, Droog, NY USA, the Rennies Collection Vancouver.
Private Collections in the USA, Canada, Suriname, Cuba, Brazil, Great Britain, Spain, Italy, Germany, France, Belgium and The Netherlands.

link to website
link to interview

The objects/elements never die, symbolically, in the artwork. By using these elements in contemporary art, they do change from their religious meaning but the new context might serve to enrich the way we look at them – allowing us to see them from a different perspective. Even traditional religious forms are changing over time because of their flexibility, especially Diaspora Afro-traditional religions and their attributes. - See more at: http://arcthemagazine.com/arc/2014/05/inspired-from-within-an-interview-with-remy-jungerman/#sthash.ogGz0iFs.dpuf

The online exhibition I curated for the March 2014 edition of the Dutch art magazine Mister Motley gave me the opportunity to see that not much has shifted in my ties to my rich Surinamese heritage, in the aesthetics I gained from the surroundings in which I grew up and in what I have learned at art schools. - See more at: http://arcthemagazine.com/arc/2014/05/inspired-from-within-an-interview-with-remy-jungerman/#sthash.ogGz0iFs.dpuf

With creating artworks I have the possibility and freedom to use objects and materials from a traditional context – mixing them to give other aesthetic meanings. By using the three-dimensional cube, grids and other geometric forms and combining them with traditional objects, this gives me the opportunity to question modernism from a different angle. By doing this, I create a reference to the traditional and the modern. - See more at: http://arcthemagazine.com/arc/2014/05/inspired-from-within-an-interview-with-remy-jungerman/#sthash.ogGz0iFs.dpuf

  In 2005 I returned to Suriname to bury my father. While there, I visited the ancestor altar of the Maroon heritage of my mother – I was born from mixed parents with roots in Europe and Africa. At that moment I realized the richness of my African roots and made the decision to do further research into that spiritual context. From that day, I knew my work would change. I knew it would take a more spiritual and religious direction, with a connection to Winti, which is an Afro-Surinamese traditional religion. I realized that there was so much aesthetic material from the practice of Winti, which I could connect to the knowledge I have gained from contemporary art, especially Modernism. All of the residue from the rituals seem like finished art pieces. The only thing I was missing was the “how” – how to make the link with contemporary art practice. - See more at: http://arcthemagazine.com/arc/2014/05/inspired-from-within-an-interview-with-remy-jungerman/#sthash.ogGz0iFs.dpuf

Visual artist Remy Jungerman was born in Moengo Suriname and his lived in Amsterdam since 1990. Through his collages, sculptures and installations he brings various materials, symbols, socio-historical contexts and locations in the world into communication with each other in order to address ideas of the local and the global. Jungerman’s work draws on Maroon culture in Suriname and the Diaspora, specifically Winti, which is an Afro-Surinamese religion.
His latest piece entitled “FODU: Ultimate Resistance” demonstrates his sustained engagement with the intersections of traditional religious practices and current trends in art. The work is now on display as part of the group exhibition Bezield: Seven Artists on Religion, Rituals and Death, which opened on May 10, 2014 at CBK Zuidoost, Amsterdam. The word “bezield” translates to “inspired” in English. I used this term as an entry point for talking with Jungerman about his art. In the interview, he pinpoints traditional and modern inspirations but he also identifies an inner stimulus – a source within him that acts as a ground on which his art is built.
- See more at: http://arcthemagazine.com/arc/2014/05/inspired-from-within-an-interview-with-remy-jungerman/#sthash.ogGz0iFs.dpuf

The online exhibition I curated for the March 2014 edition of the Dutch art magazine Mister Motley gave me the opportunity to see that not much has shifted in my ties to my rich Surinamese heritage, in the aesthetics I gained from the surroundings in which I grew up and in what I have learned at art schools. - See more at: http://arcthemagazine.com/arc/2014/05/inspired-from-within-an-interview-with-remy-jungerman/#sthash.ogGz0iFs.dpulink to websitelink to interview